Digital Single Market

Grand Coalition - Pledge of YouRock – youth employability

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YouRock is a new employability platform for young people across Europe that will help them to become more employable by encouraging them to use their existing online content creation activities as evidence of their latent skills and aptitudes.

The Challenge

There are numerous challenges for young people in the early years of their careers, and there is a gap in the online career networks and advice provided for them. Young people avoid LinkedIn, the largest career networking site, with only 17% of under 25 in the US having a profile, citing that a lack of employment history would look weak on their profile.

The response

YouRock is a new employability platform for young people across Europe that will fill this gap. It will encourage them to use their existing online content creation activities as evidence of their latent skills and aptitudes. It will involve teachers and tutors in endorsing these skills to help build a richer career networking profile for them. It will allow them to bridge the gap while they build a career history. YouRock specifically intends to help young people to become more employable, and motivate them to see technology not only as intrinsic to their employability, but also as a potential career opportunity. A voluntary hackathon to coincide with the ICT Connect Conference in Lithuania will bring together some of the best young programmers from across Europe. The hackathon will develop the prototype service.

Customers

Customers will be aged 15-24, male or female, may be employed or unemployed, or in full time education, but have little or no workplace experience or online career profile. YouRock seeks to be ambitious, and aims to reach more than 500,000 young people by the end of its first year, 1 million by the end of its second year, and 2 million by the end of its third year. It will operate in 11 countries across and beyond Europe in its first year, covering the whole of Europe by the end of its third year.

Stakeholders

YouRock will require a broad range of relationships to build engagement and capacity:

Individuals – to engage with its community and potential developers

Policy/Government – to drive political awareness raising and link to campaigns

Education – to engage with teacher/ tutors to encourage the culture of endorsement

Industry and Media – to raise awareness of it in corporate recruitment processes, exploit the capacity of industry to reach young people, and the media for the general population

NGOs – to raise awareness of YouRock as a service that could be utilised in their work

Crowdfunding

YouRock successfully raised £12,500 in a Crowdfund application to support the development of the prototype in a series of Hackathons. The first Hackathon will take place in ICT2013, Lithuania. Please see more information here.